Your Right to Know

Whose names should go on an Ohio birth certificate seems a simple matter. But a closer look at
the process indicates that it goes well beyond Biology 101 — it’s about legal issues and agency
rules as much as parenthood.

A lawsuit filed in federal court in Cincinnati this month challenged the refusal by Ohio
officials to list both members of same-sex couples on birth certificates.

How it works now:

• An unmarried man and woman can, by signing an agreement or through a paternity test, get both
names on a birth certificate as mother and father. Without that, only the mother’s name can be
listed. A same-sex couple, married or unmarried, cannot get both names on the birth
certificate.

• A heterosexual married couple that legally adopts a child can use both names on a revised
birth certificate; the original with the biological parents is sealed. A same-sex couple must
choose between one or the other as parent since the state will not allow two men or two women to
sign on the dotted line.

The Ohio Revised Code says simply, “All birth certificates shall include a statement setting
forth the names of the child’s parents and a line for the mother’s and the father’s signature.” Any
information beyond that is included in “guidance and instructions” provided by the Ohio Department
of Health “to local registrars through electronic bulletins and frequent contact with registrars,”
agency spokeswoman Tessie Pollock said.

“The birth certificate form has remained the same for many years, and there was not a policy
change in 2004,” she said. That was when Ohioans approved a statewide constitutional amendment
limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

Word on what is and isn’t allowed on birth certificates is thus filtered down from the state to
city and county health departments, which compile the data, and hospitals, which are required to
create birth records within 10 days of a live birth.

Carol Ann Fey, a Columbus family-practice lawyer, says it’s “belittling and insulting to
same-sex families that are having children together .... There’s a groundswell of recognition that
same-gender families are the same as other families.”

Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in a June 26, 2013, decision by the U.S.
Supreme Court involving a New York lesbian couple’s inheritance case, seemed to side with Fey’s
opinion. The case challenged the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

“This places same-sex couples in an unstable position of being in a second-tier marriage. The
differentiation demeans the couple, whose moral and sexual choices the Constitution protects,”
Kennedy wrote, “and it humiliates tens of thousands of children now being raised by same-sex
couples.”

Charles Tassell, of Citizens for Community Values, said neither the law nor state policy should
be changed to allow same-sex parents to appear on birth certificates as mother and father. “It’s
not an issue of lineage, but of rights and responsibilities in which the child comes first.” The
Cincinnati-based group was responsible for pushing the 2004 same-gender marriage ban.

“It takes one male and female to make a child. That appears to coincide with the law in
Ohio."

Ohio State University law professor Marc Spindelman said the lawsuit over birth certificates is
likely designed to “chip away at the prohibitions on same-sex marriage in an incremental way.”

He said it boils down to this: “Can you treat same-sex couples lawfully married in another
jurisdiction differently than a cross-sex couple for the same purposes? It seems to puts a leaden
thumb on the scales in the favor of cross-sex couples.”